A stage of their own - Sheila Stowell

The Edwardian period in Britain was characterized by turbulence and uncertainty, as an entrenched "old" order met up with the voices of a "new" century eager for release from what Samuel Hynes has called the "ossification of authority".;Scuh hollowness at the heart of the Empire produced both anxiety and exhilaration, antagonism and fierce loyalties, as attempts were made upon a number of fronts to confound such "forms" with manifestations of a new age. It was during these years that a woman's movement, dispirited after a half century of legal lobbying for the vote, was revitalized by the formation in 1903 of the Women's Social and Political Union.;Agitation for suffrage became the locus of a wide-ranging critique of a capitalist patriarchy that purported to explain and contain women by means of the ideology of "separate spheres". Among those who actively challenged the relegation of women to a "private", domesticated world were a number of self-consciously feminist playwrights who used the overtly "public" forum of drama as a point of entry to the debate. It is their work that forms the subject of this study. Recognizing that it was a period that witnessed a real explosion in the number of women dramatists, the study is selective rather than focussing upon a group of women playwrights who sought to exploit in the theatre proper some of the elements of dramatic display so successfully appropriated by the WSPU.;Written in response to what they called male-determined or male-imitative playmaking, their endeavour was a conscious attempt to construct an "authentic" woman's drama. With the exception of Githa Sowerby, about whom virtually no documentary evidence exists, the dramatists looked at were all actively involved in the suffrage movement and in addition to their full-length work for the avant-garde theatre, contributed to the overtly propagandist drama of the cause itself. Elizabeth Robins, an actor and producer who had done much to champion the Ibsen cause in Britain, was the first of this group to take her chances as a professional playwright.;Robins raised expectations in her audience which she proceeded to frustrate by means of the disruption of each form by feminist voices.